by Mia Mckenzie
* * *
—
When we get to Bianchi’s House of Pizza, which is smallish and decorated almost exclusively with art prints of classic Italian motorcycles, we find it bustling with lunchtime activity. It’s a seat yourself deal, so we grab a couple of menus from a stack at the front and find a little table near a window.
“What do you feel like?” I ask the kid. “Hawaiian, maybe?”
She makes a face. “Pepperoni. Fruit on pizza is an abomination.”
“Wow. Harsh much?”
She shrugs. “My mom used to say that.”
I don’t want to criticize her deceased mother’s shitty opinions about pizza toppings, so I just make a noncommittal face and scan the menu. “I was strictly pepperoni when I was your age. My brother used to give me a hard time about it. He only liked sausage.”
“Slade?” she asks.
“How do you know his name?”
“From your Facebook page.”
I think about all the personal info we casually reveal on social media. It’s really no wonder there’s so much identity theft. This kid could probably buy a car in my name if she wanted to.
“Slade,” she says again, giggling. “It sounds like a vampire from the Stone Age.”
I laugh, too, because it kind of does.
“What else did you find out from my Facebook page? Besides my ridiculous brother’s name.”
She thinks about it. “You don’t like your mom. And you don’t like to stay in one place.”
“I’m staying in one place right now,” I tell her. “I’m missing a trip to be here.”
“Oh,” she says. “I’m right about your mom, though. Every time you talk about her on there, it’s something bad.”
“That’s probably not true.” It is, though. I rarely mention my mother on social media, but when I do, it’s always in response to someone else’s post about their own shitty parents, e.g.: your mom sounds almost as half-assed as mine or so your mother fucked you up, too, huh?
“How come you don’t like her?” Vicky asks me.
I shrug. “Does any normal person like their mom?”
Okay, pause. Really? Who says that to a twelve-year-old who lost her mother? Jesus. Draymond. Christ. And it’s not even true! Most normal people like their mothers. It’s us abnormals—us emotionally damaged mofos—who don’t. Before I can take it back, Vicky says, “I liked mine. She was fun.”
“Of course you liked her,” I say, wishing I were dead. “And you’re totally normal. I was trying to be funny and it went left. Sorry.”
A waiter comes over and takes our order: a half-pepperoni, half-Hawaiian pizza and two root beers.
“So, you and Cynthia were pretty close, huh?” I ask Vicky, once the waiter’s gone.
“Yup. We did a lot of stuff together.”
“Like what?”
“Like play basketball. Watch movies. Practice spelling. She used to do bees when she was a kid, too. She won like four trophies.”
A memory scratches at the back of my brain, of Cynthia spelling out words from the Bible, like “hearken.”
“She was helping me study for my first bee when she got sick,” Vicky says. “She used to quiz me with words from her law books sometimes. Those were so hard! If she was at work, she would call me and give me a word over the phone.”
“That does sound fun.” It doesn’t sound fun. But it sounds like the two of them got a kick out of it and that’s what matters, right? “See, you’re totes normal.”
“I’m not that normal,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have to go to therapy every week.”
“Oh. Well, that’s…pretty normal these days, right?”
“You go to therapy?” she asks.
“Not currently. But I did for a while in college.”
“How come?”
Wow, kids really have trash boundaries, don’t they? “I guess I was trying to sort out some things. About myself.”
“Like being a lesbian?”
“Sure. But also family stuff.” As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t. I shift in my seat, suddenly anxious, and hope the kid doesn’t press me. I don’t like to talk about “family stuff.”
The waiter places two fountain root beers on the table.
“Did it help?” Vicky asks when he’s gone.
“What? Therapy?”
She nods.
I shake my head. “No. My therapist was a skinny, white grad student. I only went four times.”
She sips her soda. “School said I had to go. ’Cause I used to get really mad.”
“About your mom?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I punched the wall one time.”
“They sent you to therapy just for punching the wall?”
“Some other stuff happened, too. But it was a while ago,” she says, shrugging. “I still have to go every week. I guess until they decide I’m not going to beat anybody up.”
“Anybody? I thought you just punched the wall.”
“That time, yeah,” she says. “This other time, I got really mad and punched this boy, Malik. But only because he said something bad about my mom.”
“Hmm.”
“I guess I was madder at cancer than him, though. That’s what Vanessa said. She’s my therapist. I guess if cancer was a person, I could’ve beat it up instead of Malik.”
“Punch cancer in the stomach?”
“Yup.”
“Scratch its eyes out?”
“Uh-huh.” She sips her soda.
“Kick it in the dick?”
She bursts into hysterical laughter and soda comes out of her nose. I laugh, too, partly because I love my own jokes but also because her laughter is loud and boundless and I like being part of it. I think about myself at her age, angry, too, but with no clue how to deal with it, holding it in until it eventually morphed into depression. Maybe I should’ve just beat somebody up. I had a Malik in my seventh-grade class, too, but he’d been held back twice and was the size of a high school junior, so probably not him.
“What’d this little Malik bastard say about your mom?” I ask Vicky.
“He said that his mom said my mom was a stuck-up B.”
Sounds like Malik’s mama should’ve been the one to get clocked. “You told the principal that’s why you hit him?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t listen. Most grown-ups don’t.”
“What about your aunt?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes she does. Way more than my dad. Way, way more than his stupid wife. But not like my mom. She always listened to me.”
That must have been nice.
Vicky takes another sip of soda. “Nobody loves you like your mom. You know?”
I laugh. An actual, factual out-loud chuckle. It’s not the response of a well-adjusted person.
The kid looks at me, like she did that day in the hot dog shop, like she’s trying to see inside me. I try not to let that happen, mostly by looking everywhere but directly at her. Finally, she sips her soda again and says, “Maybe you should go back to therapy.”
“Well, shit.”
“I’m not saying that to be mean. I just think it kinda helps.”
“Is it helping you?”
“Yup.”
“You don’t get angry anymore?”
“Yeah, but about other stuff.”
“For instance?”
She thinks about it. “Police brutality. The police in general, actually. Anti-Black racism. That’s a big one. Slut-shaming.”
“Slut-shaming?”
“Yeah! It’s really messed up how girls get treated if some boy says they’re a ho.”
“You’re in seventh grade.”
She looks at me like, Why would that matter? I think back on seventh grade and see her point.
“Okay. What else?”
“The school-to-prison pipeline! I hate that!” She bangs her fist on the table and some soda sloshes out of my glass. “Sorry,” she says, grabbing a handful of napkins and mopping it up.
“Where’d you learn about all this? Your mom?”
“Aunt Faye, mostly. And my friend Keisha. She lives on my block. She’s in high school. My stepsister tells me stuff sometimes, too.”
“If you and your aunt are anti-cops,” I say, “why’d she almost call them on me the other day?”
Vicky shakes her head. “She wouldn’t do that. Unless you were, like, murdering somebody maybe. We believe in community alternatives to police,” she says, sounding like one of those tween activists you sometimes see on the news, holding up signs at marches that read: Donald Duck Would Make a Better President. It’s adorbs.
I don’t remember thinking much about important socio-political issues when I was twelve. I was too busy trying to catch a glimpse of a titty on the scrambled porn channel. Sure, I learned about the Civil Rights Movement in fourth grade but it was mostly Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They definitely didn’t teach us about Malcolm X or Angela Davis. I never even heard of Ericka Huggins until college, when I joined the Black Student Alliance and we invited her to speak at a rally against campus police harassment of Black students. I was twenty. So, yeah. I definitely didn’t know shit about “community alternatives to police” in seventh freaking grade. I think it’s pretty cool that Vicky does, though.
“She was probably just calling Uncle Nick,” Vicky says.
“Who’s that?”
“Her boyfriend. Or fiancé, I guess.”
“Wait,” I say. “Someone is marrying your mean auntie?”
“She’s not mean, usually,” Vicky says. “She just doesn’t like you, I guess.”
Tuh! “Well, I don’t like her, either. So we’re on the same page. About that. About not liking each other. Equally.”
The kid looks like she doesn’t know what to say to that perfectly mature response.
The waiter brings our food and, as I stuff my face with it, I think about how wrong Cynthia was about fruit on pizza and then catch myself wondering if her mean sister likes Hawaiian or not.
9
Day one of my trip to Brazil is going splendidly without me, according to Toni, who already looks sun-kissed and only a little bit stressed out on our video call the next morning. “There’s been a couple of tiny hiccups, but nothing serious enough to bother you with,” she says. “Our interns have been great. Our travelers are happy.”
I feel pangs of envy and regret at not being there, especially because Toni is telling me all this while sitting in front of a window through which I can see the sand and surf of Maresias.
“And did you see?” she asks. “The June Bali-Sydney trip is almost completely booked already. You’ll be back by then, right?”
“Definitely.” Two and a half months is more than enough time to build a lifelong relationship, right?
I decide to stop feeling envious and regretful, and instead celebrate the first day of the Brazil trip by patronizing my regular bar—a little jawn not far from the B and B that has all my favorite bourbons. I’m sitting there, drinking a Knob Creek, thinking about sunny beaches, and generally minding my own business, when this ugly man comes and sits down beside me. There are four other empty chairs at the bar, but he sits right next to me. I hate it when men do this. “How you doin’ today, sis?” he asks.
I don’t answer. I just stare at him blankly, eyes wide, for, like, fifteen straight seconds, hoping he’ll get freaked out and leave me alone.
“I said how you doin’?” he says again, leaning a little closer to me, like maybe I didn’t hear him the first time. He has a gold tooth and it catches the light from one of the ceiling lamps over the bar. “What, you can’t even speak?” he asks. “You one of them conceited chicks, huh?”
The blank stare isn’t working, so it’s on to plan B. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, I’m deaf, I sign. My sign language is a little bit rusty, so it’s possible I’m not getting it exactly right, but I’m pretty sure this dude isn’t going to know.
He blinks a few times and his eyebrows draw together. “You deaf?”
I stare at him.
“Shit, I ain’t never met no deaf jawn. That’s wild.”
It’s occurred to me before that pretending to be deaf in order to avoid harassment from ugly men might be kinda messed up. I mean, I like to think Deaf women would understand, but maybe not. Maybe if a Deaf woman saw me doing this, she’d be like, How dare you, hearing-ass bitch? Which is probably fair. But on the other hand: I really don’t want to talk to this fugly-ass dude.
You’re not even a little bit handsome, I sign. Not. Even. A. Little. Bit.
He looks from my hands to my face. Blinks a few more times. “What you drinking? Lemme buy you a round.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. You. Are. Mad. Ugly. Bro. I sign it vigorously, with as much flourish as I can manage.
He looks around, in case there’s someone close by who can help him figure out how to go about picking up a Deaf woman. A little farther down the bar, a man who has been watching us stifles a laugh. My suitor calls out to him. “You know deaf language, my nigga?”
He shakes his head. “Nah. Sorry, man.”
He sits there a little while longer, saying things like, “Where you stay at?” and “You fine for a deaf chick” and “You only date deaf dudes or you like niggas that can hear?” I just stare at him the whole time, feigning a look of utter confusion. Finally, he shakes his head, mutters something under his breath that sounds like, “This really some wild shit,” picks up his drink, and leaves. Not just leaves the seat, but leaves the entire bar, drink in hand. What the hell? But also: Thank God.
“That was amazing,” says the man farther down the bar.
I ignore him.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Viva.
You around?
At the Swank.
Just got back from yoga. Mind if I join?
Sounds good.
The guy down the bar asks, “Where’d you learn to sign?”
I catch the bartender’s eye, point to my empty bourbon glass, and he pours me another.
“I know you can hear me,” says the guy. “I know you’re not deaf, Skye.”
I look at him. He looks kind of familiar, but I can’t place him.
“Shit, you already forgot me? That’s cold-blooded.”
“That’s cold-blooded” is a thing only old Black men say. This guy looks too young to be saying it. That thought feels like déjà vu and then it clicks. I talked to this guy a few nights ago. More than talked, I guess, considering I woke up next to him the following morning.
“Oh. Hey.”
He grins. “Hey.”
I go back to my bourbon.
After about half a minute, he says, “So? Where did you learn how to sign?”
I’m never going to fuck you ever again, is what I want to say. But I’m trying not to be extra. So instead, I say, “Look, can we just forget what happened?”
He purses his lips, thinks about it for a second. “Maybe you can. I probably can’t.”
“Okay, then I will.”
“Just like that, huh? You must have strange men dancing naked in your hotel room a lot if you can just forget it that easily.”
“You danced…?”
He grins again. “Oh, so you already forgot what happened. Well, you had a lot to drink, so I’m not surprised.”
I sip my bourbon. “Well, I’m not drinking today, so don’t get any ideas.”
He looks from me to the bourbon. “You literally took a drink while you were saying that.”
“I mean I’m not getting drunk,” I tell him. “I’m just having this one drink and
that’s it.”
“That’s already your second drink.”
“Jesus, who are you, my great-granddad? I coulda sworn Nana killed you and buried you under the azaleas in, like, 1983.”
He holds up both hands. “Okay. Sorry.” Then he says, “You know we didn’t sleep together that night? I mean, we made out pretty heavily—”
Ew.
“And we did technically sleep in the same bed. But we didn’t…y’know.”
“Of course I know that.” Okay, this is an enormous relief. I only dabble in dick, like one penis per decade, and I’m pretty selective. This guy’s not bad-looking in a bug-eyed, young James Baldwin kind of way, but his is not a dick I would have selected under more sober circumstances. So, this is heartening news. It also explains why I didn’t wake up naked that morning, a fact that is only just now occurring to me.
“Well, then,” he says, “hopefully things don’t have to be awkward. I really like this bar and I’d hate to have to stop coming here.”
I shrug. “It’s not awkward for me,” I tell him. It’s hella awkward, though, and he should definitely stop coming here.
He smiles, nods, throws some cash up on the bar. “Aight,” he says, getting up to go. “I’ll see you around, then, Skye.”
“Cool beans, bruh.” Ugh, why.
As he’s leaving, Viva’s entering and I watch him watch her ass as she goes by. Creep.
“¿Qué estás bebiendo?” Viva asks, sitting down next to me. “Bourbon?”
“Knob. ¿Quieres?”
“Chica. You know I can’t handle brown liquor.” She makes a face like she’s having nasty bourbon-related flashbacks. Then she orders a White Russian.
My phone buzzes on the bar and I glance at it. “It’s Slade again.”
Viva frowns. “¿Por qué tanto Slade últimamente?”
“He’s been nagging me about going to see my mother,” I say. “He’s never cared before. But the other day he made up a stroke to get me to visit her in the hospital.”
“She’s in the hospital again?” Viva asks, looking concerned.
“She’s fine. She just got dizzy. I’m sure she’s back home now.”